


what does it take for stars to open wide

by Alethiometric



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: AU, Amnesia, Angst, Insanity, Lots and lots of character death, Other, Post-Reichenbach, Post-The Wedding Of River Song, Vegetable Death, brain damaged!jim
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-08-04
Updated: 2012-08-04
Packaged: 2017-11-11 10:00:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/477312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alethiometric/pseuds/Alethiometric
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With nothing left for him on Earth, Richard steps on board the TARDIS and goes flying through time and space with the Doctor. What he doesn't know is that he's traveling with the very man who unwittingly stripped him of everything that kept him tied to the Earth in the first place. With the faintest of trust built between them, they are both plunged into a cross-dimensional war, one where the steady beat of four threads its way through the cosmos and zeppelins fill the Void between worlds.</p><p>Wholock AU. I'm aiming for chapter updates roughly every two weeks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	what does it take for stars to open wide

It’s a broken glass that fractures into Richard’s hand as he sinks to the ground, and Sebastian picks up the phone at one in the morning to hear the other man in tears. He’s on the other side of the world, some easy job in Japan, and it was finished the night before so he packs immediately and comes home on the first plane he can catch. Because the glass was an accident and also wasn’t; because it wasn’t Richard who attacked his own hands with the shards, and with loss of motor control would go loss of mental faculties. They had known from the outset that it couldn’t last, that the happy, simpler periods they had enjoyed at the beginning were only a brief break from Richard’s eventual decline. And while it was certain, they both fully intended to go down fighting.  


Or at least they did until the day that Richard blacked out for three hours and came to lying next to the corpse of a pregnant woman. He didn’t lose the haunted look in his eyes for weeks, and when Sebastian burst into his room one evening and wrenched the gun out of his shaking hands, it intensified to a brutally empty thousand-yard stare that he wore the entire day.  


Sebastian wouldn’t let him dictate the method of his own death, and while that was an injustice it was also for the better, because Richard didn’t want to die, not really, he just thought it would be better than living with the constant fear of waking up to find he had slit his wrists in his sleep. Sebastian was the only thing keeping him safe, keeping him tied to earth and alive.  


So when Richard stands on the curb, prepared to step out into the motorway, and Sebastian spots him with a shout, Richard never doubted for a second that he would be rescued.  


But Sebastian could never have moved fast enough to get to Richard before being struck by a massive blue box that careened out of nowhere, seemingly appearing from the air, and Richard screamed as his sniper was driven hard into the tarmac, an audible snap from the spine the only noise he could hear.  
The world blurs around him as he sprints across the road, narrowly avoiding the cab drivers leaning on their horns, and the box is gone before he reaches Sebastian. Richard stops at the body and crouches down, rocking and keening in agony as he cradles Sebastian’s shattered skull on both hands. His sniper’s eyes stare into nothingness, gray-green and red-streaked, and that is the image that will haunt the space behind Richard’s own eyes for the rest of his life. The paramedics pull him away, their mouths moving silently behind the pounding rush in Richard’s ears, and he finds out later that he wouldn’t stop screaming in harsh, tearing sobs until his throat was red-raw and his voice was gone.

A week later, he stands at the gravestone with the flowers hanging from one limp hand. The other one rests over his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose, and there’s a howling wind that tears at his overcoat, Seb’s overcoat, but it’s his now that Seb’s gone.

He’s off work for a month, not enough time by any means, but the studio can’t spare him for any longer, and so he throws himself back into his work, hiding the loss behind smiles and bright black eyes projected to the camera. In between takes, though, he sits in the corner with a cup of coffee, and no-one approaches him because his eyes yawn empty and sad.

It’s been five months since Sebastian died, and Richard has moved away from the flat and rented an attic in the country instead. It’s away from the studio, sure, but he can drive in for the once-a-week broadcasts, his hours cut back now due to black eyes and three mental breakdowns on-camera. The woman downstairs is elderly, and her granddaughter comes in nearly every day to take her out to town, so Richard is free to lie around the house, watching crap telly and flipping past the news stories; some celebrity baby birth, a drive-by shooting in London, the declining bee populations, obesity epidemics in the States. He barely registers any of the stories, really just looking for something to distract him from the constant gaping hole where his memories used to be, the edges torn raw now that Sebastian’s not there to stitch them back up again.  


He learns to garden, takes to it surprisingly fast; there’s a sort of comfort in growing sets of perfectly ordered cherry tomatoes. He pours his heart into those tomatoes—even enters some local contests, where people know him as _that sad man from London who doesn’t remember who he is_.  
He loves those tomatoes, a vengeful slap in the face to his life, and he hoes at the dirt with a ferocity that seems to be daring the world to take this last thing away from him.  


Two months later, he hears a noise in the early morning, and goes outside in a bathrobe and slippers to see a massive blue police box sitting right on top of his tomato bed. He drops the flashlight, and a tall, lanky man comes around from the far side of the box, his face streaked with soot but grinning hugely.  
“Oh, hello! _Terribly_ sorry about the noise; had a bit of an iffy landing there for a moment, but let me tell you those Sycorax guards are _persistent_ , sorry about the flowerbeds! She’s a picky old girl,” he slaps the box affectionately, “and I didn’t have a lot of choice with where she landed, what with all the smoke! And you are—“  


That’s as far as he gets before Richard lunges for him, screaming savagely.

**Author's Note:**

> Work title is from the lyrics of Ballad of a Weary Traveler by Halia Meguid (aka Dustyteeth@tumblr). :3


End file.
